U.S. Army Spends $100 Million to Pick a New Drone

The U.S. Army is looking for a few good drones.

As recently as a few months ago it looked like it had found the drones it was looking for, settling upon privately held Martin UAV and publicly traded Textron (NYSE: TXT) to provide "scout drones" for it to test as potential replacements for the RQ-7 Shadow drones (also built by Textron, incidentally) that it has been using up till now. In March, Martin and Textron were the only two companies (out of 11 competing) to win $99.5 million contracts to supply units to be tested as part of the Army's Future Tactical Unmanned Aerial System (FTUAS) competition. 

Now that competition has been blown wide open.

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Source Fool.com